The Things They Carried
by unanymousdeen
Summary: Among other things, many soldiers deal with the surreal and ambiguous nature of the war, the inadequacy of plain facts in communicating certain essential truths, and the alienation of the war veteran told by a set of meaningful stories through the eyes of Commander Shepard. This ME version is based off of Tim O'Brien's masterful work, "They Things They Carried".


**Writing this has taken up my entire day and I'm glad to say I have no regrets. But, I hope I don't get sued. The credit for just about everything written here goes to Tim O'Brien, the genious behind _The Things They Carried_. Only a couple words are mine [that I inserted to smooth down the rough edges between 1956 and 2186] and the characters of Mass Effect goes directly to Bioware. **

_**They Things They Carried**_** was an amazing book for me and already being introduced into the world of Mass Effect, I thought, "How cool would it be to throw in our favorite characters into the novel?" For those of you who have yet to read this book, I reccommend it. It's a story with a huge meaning that you really have to dig in to understand. For those of you who have already read the novel, you'll be saying, "Omg, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is James Vega! Zomg Commander Shepard is Tim O'Brien!" *fangirling***

**This is obviously vastly shorter than the novel, but 98% word-for-word passages from the book. These were pretty important scenes (to my opinion, at least) and give you the jist for some of the book. I would still suggest picking up the actual paper-copy.**

**Commander Shepard narrarates the entire passage you're about to read, just as Tim O'Brien narrarates the entire novel.**

_**The Things They Carried **_**takes place in Vietnam, 1956. This version takes place during _a_ war in 2186. Not the Reaper war. _A_ war...of some kind.**

* * *

First Lieutenant James Vega carried emails on his omni-tool from a girl named Elena, his life-long partner in education since grade school. They weren't love letters or anything, but Lieutenant Vega was hoping that they would be, and kept each individual message stashed away in the "Important" folder—classified. After a day's search and rescue, he would open them, read through them, and spend an hour pretending. He would imagine their romantic adventures and daydream about their first kiss. He wanted her to love him and he loved her more than anything. She was a school teacher down on Earth in Vancouver, Canada, teaching chemistry and physics. She never mentioned the war, other than to say "Stay safe" and "Be careful". They were always signed Love, Elena, but Lieutenant Vega knew that Love was only a way of signing and did not meaning anything else. At night, he would close the messages and lay down, glancing up at the star-littered skies and wonder when he'd get to see her again.

Kaiden Alenko, who was scared, carried thirty-four rounds when he was shot and killed outside Everest, and he went down an exceptional burden, the armor and helmet and rations and water and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the weighted fear. He was dead weight. There was no extra movement. Jacob Taylor, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something—just boom, then down—not like the movies where the dead guy twitches and flops and does fancy spins—not like that, Jacob said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. Lieutenant Vega kept to himself. He pictured Elena's smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Kaiden Alenko was dead because he loved her so much and couldn't stop thinking about her. He found himself trembling.

He tried not to cry.

He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Elena more than his men, and as a consequence Alenko was dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war. In part, he was grieving for Kaiden Alenko, but mostly it was for Elena, and himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a school teacher in Vancouver, Canada, and because he realized she did not love him and never would.

Henceforth, when he thought about Elena, it would be about how she belonged somewhere else. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Earth, it was another world, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Jacob was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead.

The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, a little boy with a plastic leg hopped over to Grunt and asked for a ration—"GI number one," the kid said—and Grunt laughed and handed over the ration. When the boy hopped away, Grunt chuckled and said, "War's a bitch." He shook his head sadly. "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo."

I remember Tali'Zorah nar Rayya and Thane Krios playing chess every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would hide out and animate the board and play long, silent games as the sky went from pink to purple. The rest of the group would sometimes stop by and watch. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were orange ships and green ships. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.

I remember Tali'Zorah smiling as she told me that one story. Most of it she made up, I'm sure, but even so it felt real to me. Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you're pinned down by a war you never feel more at peace.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:

Tali'Zorah was lying on her back one night, watching the stars, the whispering to me, "I'll tell you something, Shepard. If I could have one wish, anything, I'd wish for my father to write me an email and say it's okay if I don't win any medals. That's all my father talks about, nothing else. How he can't wait to see my fucking medals."

This is true. I had a buddy in Everest. His name was Mordin Solus. A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Mordin sits down and writes an email to the guy's sister. It was a terrific email, very personal and touching. Mordin almost bawls typing it. He gets all teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lightning up cities and bringing smoke to bear every which way. A great sense of humor, too. And then the email gets very sad and serious. Mordin pours his heart out. He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or something, they had a whole lot in common. He tells the guy's sister he'll call her when they war's over.

So what happens? Mordin sends the email. He waits two months. The dumb cunt never writes back.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck. When a soldier dies, like Jack, you looked away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it _seemed_.

The dead girl's name was Jack. What happened was we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third day, we took a break along a trail in the jungle. Right away, Jack and Mordin start screwing around with smoke grenades and inventing games to pass the time. They were just playing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must've been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Jack step from the shade into the bright sunlight. Her face was suddenly tan and shining. A gorgeous girl, really. Sharp brown eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when she died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around her and lifted her up and sucked her high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.

Sometimes a true war story cannot be believed because some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal parts are not. Sometimes, a true war story is impossible to tell. Garrus Vakarian recounts the experience of a troop that goes into the mountains on a listening post operation. He says that after a few days, the men hear strange echoes and music—chimes and beats—and become frightened. One night, the men hear voices and noises that sound like a party or a casino. After a while they hear singing and chanting, as well as talking animals and trees. They order air strikes and they burn and shoot down everything they can find. Still, in the morning, they hear the noises. So they pack up their gear and head down the mountain, where their colonel asks them what they heard. They have no answer. And in the morning, Vakarian comes up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out, checking weapons, going through all the rituals that preceded a day's match. Already the lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west.

"I've got a confession to make," Vakarian said. "Last night, I had to make up a few things."

"I know that."

"The glee club. There wasn't any glee club."

"Right."

"No opera."

"Forget it, I understand."

"Yeah, but listen, it's still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sounds you just plain won't believe."

When Jack was killed, I found it hard to mourn. I knew her only slightly, and what I did know was not impressive. She had a tendency to play the tough soldier role, always posturing, always puffing herself up, and on occasion she took it too far. She had an opinion of herself, I think, that was too high for her own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that she kept trying to erase.

At the thought of a dentist working inside her mouth made Jack tense up. She kept fidgeting and playing with her dog tags. When somebody asked what her problem was, she merely explained she had some bad experiences with dentists in high school.

Jack fainted before the dentist could even get her in the chair.

The embarrassment must've turned a screw in her head. Late that night she crept down to the dental facility. She turned on the flashlight in her omni-tool, woke up the young captain and told him she had a monster of a toothache. The dentist couldn't find any problem, but Jack kept insisting, so the man finally shrugged and shot in the pain killer and yanked out a perfectly good tooth. There was some pain, no doubt, but in the morning Jack was all smiles.

When she was nine, my daughter Karla asked if I had ever killed anyone. She knew about the war; she knew I'd been a soldier. "You keep writing these war stories," she said, "so I guess you must've killed somebody." It was a difficult moment, but I did what seemed right, which was to say, "Of course not," and then to take her onto my lap and hold her for a while. Someday, I hope, she'll ask again. But her I want to pretend she's a grown-up. I want to tell her exactly what happened, or what I remember happening, and then I want to say to her that as a little girl she was absolutely right.

I received a long, disjointed email in which Tali'Zorah described the problem of finding a meaningful use for her life after the war. She worked as a technician and engineer. She lived with her father, who supported her, and who treated her with kindness and obvious love. At one point she had enrolled in a college on her homeworld, but the coursework, she said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. She dropped out after eight months. She spent her mornings in bed. In the afternoons she spent building miniature VIs and then at night, she'd drive around the town in her father's speeder, mostly alone, cruising.

"The thing is," she wrote, "there's no place to go. Not just in this little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I killed over in Everest…hard to describe. That night when Jacob got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him...feels like I'm still in deep shit."

The email's tone jumped from self-pity to anger and irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. She didn't know what to feel. In the middle of the email, for example, she approached herself for complaining too much. I felt it coming, the near end of the email it came. She explained that she had read my first book, which she liked except for the "bleeding-heart political part." For half a page she talked about how much the book had meant to her, how it brought back all kinds of memories most of the characters, including herself, even though almost all the names were changed. Then Tali'Zorah came straight out with it:

_What you should do, John, is write a story about a girl who feels like she got zapped over in that shithole. A girl who can't get her act together and just drives around town all day and can't think of any damn place to go and doesn't know how to get there anyway. This girl wants to talk about it, but she can't…if you want, you can use the stuff in this email. (But not my real name, okay?) I'd write it myself except I can't ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can't figure out what exactly to say. Something about the field that night. The way Jacob just disappeared into the shitfield. You were there—you can tell it._

Tali'Zorah's email hit me hard. For years I'd felt a certain smugness about how easily I had made the shift from war to peace. A nice smooth glide—no flashbacks or midnight sweats. The war was over, after all. And the thing to do was go on.

The writing went quickly and easily. I drafted the piece in a week or two, fiddled with it for another week, then published it as a separated short story.

Now, a decade after her suicide (due to depression and sense of extreme insecurity and other psychological issues), I'm hoping that her story makes good in Tali'Zorah's silence. Although the old structure remains, the piece has been substantially revised, in some places by severe cutting, in other places by the addition of new material. Tali is back in the story, where she belongs, and I don't think she would mind that her real name appears. The central incident—our long night in the shitfield along—has been restored to the piece. It was hard stuff to write. Jacob, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I've avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it's not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Tali'Zorah was in no way responsible for what happened to Jacob. Tali did not experience a failure of nerve that night. She did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.

I wished there was some other way to look at it, but there wasn't. Very simple and very final. Tali remembered two mortar rounds hitting close by. Then a third, even closer, and off to her left she'd heard somebody scream. The voice was ragged and clotted up, but she knew instantly that it was Jacob.

She remembered trying to crawl toward the screaming. No sense of direction, though, and the field seemed to suck him under, and everything was black and wet, and she couldn't get her bearings, and then another round hit nearby and for a few moments all she could do was hold her breath and duck down beneath the water.

Later, when she came up again, there was no more screams. There an arm and a wristwatch and a part of a boot. There were bubbles were Jacob's head should've been.

She remembered grabbing the boot. She remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war she couldn't win, and how finally she had to whisper her friend's name and let go and watch the boot side away. Then for a long time there were things she would not remember. Various sounds, various smells. Later she'd found herself lying on the little rise and explosions and bubbling and her weapon and her flashlight and Jacob's picture. She remembered this. She remembered wondering if he could lose herself.

Tali'Zorah couldn't look when they pulled Jacob's body out of the muck a day later. She felt like throwing up and running away.

Years later, I took my daughter Karla to the field where Jacob died. It looks smaller and peaceful. Karla doesn't understand why we were here—she's only ten—but she generally keeps quiet. She asks me why the war was fought, and why I had to fight in it, and I had no answers. She got frustrated, and thinks I'm weird because I can't forget something that happened so long ago. I tell Karla almost nothing about why we were there. I quietly took Jacob's moccasins out of the bundle and put them under the mud, trying to find the place where his body was found. I slid into the muck as Karla watched in confusion and disgust. I wanted to say something profound but can't think of anything. It was then I saw an old Vietnamese farmer watching me intently. The man raises his shovel fiercely, then continued to work in the field. Karla asked if the man was angry with me, but I told her that that's all over.

Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That's basic psychology. I've pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor gets manipulated as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul. The hours go by and you lose your gyroscope; your mind starts to roam. You think about dark closets, madmen, murderers under the bed, all those childhood fears. Gremlins and trolls and giants. You try to block it out but you can't. You see ghosts. You blink and shake your head. Bullshit, you tell yourself. But then you remember the soldiers who died: Jack, Jacob Taylor, Kaiden Alenko, and half-dozen others whose faces you can't bring into focus anymore.

A few words about Mordin Solus. I wasn't there when he got hurt, but Garrus Vakarian later told me the essential facts. Apparently he lost his cool. Too many body bags, maybe. Too much gore.

At first, Mordin just sank inside himself, not saying a word, but then later on, after five or six days, it flipped the other way. He couldn't stop talking. Wacky talk, too. Talking about bugs, for instance; how the worst thing was the goddam bugs. Big giant killer bugs, he'd say, mutant bugs, bugs with fucked up DNA, bugs that were chemically altered by napalm and defoliants and tear gas. He claimed the bugs were personally after his ass. He said he could hear the bastards honing in on him. Swarms of mutant bugs, billions of them, they had him bracketed. Each whispering his name and it was driving him crazy.

Odd stuff, Vakarian said, and it wasn't just talk. Mordin developed some peculiar habits. Constantly scratching himself. Clawing at the bug bites. He couldn't quit digging into his skin, making big scabs and then ripping off the scabs and scratching the open sores.

It was a sad to watch. Definitely not the old Mordin Solus. His whole personality seemed out of kilter.

To an extent, though, everybody was feeling it. The long night marches turned their minds upside down; all the rhythms were wrong. Always a lost sensation. They'd blunder along through the dark, willy-nilly, no sense of place or direction, probing for an enemy that nobody could see. Like a snipe hunt, Vakarian said. A bunch of dumb Scouts chasing the phantoms. All around you, everywhere, the whole dark country-side came alive. You'd hear a strange hum in your ears. Nothing specific; nothing you could put a name on.

It was no joke, Vakarian said. The monkeys chattered death-chatter. The nights got freaky.

Mordin Solus finally hit a wall.

He couldn't sleep during the hot daylight hours; he couldn't cope with the nights. Late one afternoon, at the platoon prepared for another march, he broke down in front of Garrus Vakarian. Not crying, but up against it. He said he was scared. And it wasn't normal scared. He didn't know _what_ it was; too long in-country, probably. Or else he wasn't cut out to be a medic. Always policing up the parts, he said. Always plugging up holes. Sometimes he'd stare at men who were still okay, the alive guys, and he'd start to picture how they'd look dead. Without arms or legs—that sort of thing. It was ghoulish, he knew that, but he couldn't shut off the pictures. He'd be sitting there talking with Tali'Zorah or Krios or somebody, just marking time, and then out of nowhere he's find himself wondering how much the guy's head weighed, like how _heavy_ it was, and what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a chopper and dump it in.

Mordin scratched the skin at his elbow, digging in hard. His eyes were red and weary.

"It's not right," he said. "The pictures in my mind. Won't recede. I see everyone's liver. Not frightening, but nauseating. Makes me curious. Like a doctor looking at patient not as person. Sees only ruptured appendix or clogged up artery."

His voice floated away for a second. He looked up at Garrus and tried to smile.

"Anyway," Mordin said, "days aren't too bad. At night the images hurt. I see my body. Chunks of myself. My heart. Kidneys. One day, I'll be dead in the field. No one will find me. The bugs will. I can see the bugs. They eat away at me. I can't keep seeing myself dead."

Garrus Vakarian nodded. He didn't know what to say. For a time they sat watching the shadows come, then Mordin shook his head.

He said he'd done his best. He'd tried to be a decent medic. Win some and lose some, he said, but he'd tried hard. Briefly then, rambling a little, he talked about a few of the soldiers who were gone now, Jack and Jacob Taylor and Kaiden Alenko, and how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.

Then he almost laughed.

"This whole war," he said. "You know what it is? A big banquet. Meat. You and me. Everybody. Meat for bugs."

The next morning he shot himself.

He took off his boots, laid out his medical kit, drugged himself up, and put a round through his foot.

Nobody blamed him, Vakarian said.

Before the chopper came, there was time for goodbyes. Lieutenant Vega went over and said he'd vouch that it was an accident. Thane Krios and Grunt gave him a stack of comic books on a datapad for hospital reading. Everybody stood in a little circle, feeling bad about it, trying to cheer him up with bullshit about a great night life on the Citadel.

But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right, I keep dreaming Ashley Williams alive. And Kaiden Alenko, too, and Jacob Taylor, and Jack, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pile of rubble, and several others whose bodies I lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Ashley Williams was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real.

I just loved her.

She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking.

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones—_that_ kind of love.

Ashley wore her new red cap to school every day. She never took it off, not even in the classroom, and so it was inevitable that she took some teasing about it. Most of it came from a kid named Nick Veenhof. Out on the playground, during recess, Nick would creep up behind her and make a grab for the cap, almost yanking it off, then scampering away. It went on like that for weeks: the girls giggling, the guys egging him on. Naturally I wanted to do something about it, but it just wasn't possible. I had my reputation to think about. I had my pride. And there was also the problem with Nick Veenhof. So I stood off to the side, just a spectator, wishing I could things I couldn't do. I wanted Ashley clamp down the cap with the palm of her hand, holding it there, smiling in Nick's direction as if none of it really mattered.

At some point, I had come to understand that Ashley was sick, maybe even dying, but I loved her and just couldn't accept it. In the middle of summer, I remember my mother tried to explain to me about brain tumors. Now and then, she said, bad things start growing inside us. Sometimes you can cut them out and other times you can't, and for Ashley Williams it was one of those times when you can't.

I thought about it for several days. "All right," I finally said. "So will she get better now?"

"Well, no," my mother said, "I don't think so." She stared at a spot behind my shoulder. "Sometimes people don't ever get better. They die sometimes."

I shook my head.

"Not Ashley," I said.

But on a September afternoon, during noon recess, Nick Veenhof came up to me on the school playground. "Your girlfriend," he said, "she kicked the bucket."

At first I didn't understand.

In the months after Kaiden Alenko died, there were many other bodies. I never shook hands—not that—but one afternoon I climbed a tree and threw down what was left of Jack. I watched my friend Jacob Taylor sink into the muck. And in early July, after a battle in the mountains, I was assigned to a six-man detail to police up the enemy KIAs. There were twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. The dead were everywhere. Some lay in piles. Some lay alone. One, I remember, seemed to kneel. Another was bent from the waist over a small boulder, the top of his head on the ground, his arms rigid, the eyes squinting in concentration as if he were about to perform a handstand or somersault. It was my worst day at the war. For three hours we carried the bodies down the mountain to a clearing alongside a narrow dirt path. At one point Garrus Vakarian looked at me and said, "Hey, I just realized something."

"What?"

"Death sucks."

And then it becomes 2200. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming about Ashley Williams alive in exactly the same way. She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I'm gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Jacob Taylor, too, and Kaiden Alenko and Jack, and sometimes I can even see Johnny skating with Ashley under the yellow floodlights. I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm always skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize that it is as John Shepard trying to save Johnny's life with a story.


End file.
